I completely agree. I think we're in for a very long wait. We over achieved getting into space and landing on the moon so quickly. (barely 50 years after air tr

I completely agree. I think we're in for a very long wait. We over achieved getting into space and landing on the moon so quickly. (barely 50 years after air travel was a viable technology) I don't see a private industry for space travel unless a few things happen: 1) Earth's resources are depleted to the point where we need to harvest them from another planet. The situation would have to be VERY bad for us to get to that point. More likely than not it would be another dark ages for most of humanity with private space travel extracting valuable resources for the extremely rich & powerful. 2) Contact with intelligent life. It seems certain now this will not be in our own solar system so this raises the bar on the technology private industry would have to develop to travel so far. Very likely it would span the lifetimes of several generations of humans traveling to even a nearby solar system. 3) Over population on Earth becomes such a problem that a massive number of people are driven to taking the huge risk of re-locating to some underground colony on Mars. If you had 100 or 200 million people willing to relocate to Mars there would actually be a viable business model there I bet. (kind of similar to what happened with immigration to America early in the last century. It was expensive, dangerous, and life wasn't really that much better when you got there but the alternative was just so bad people were willing to take the chance) So realistically I think we're probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of years away from the standard sci-fi dream of accessible human space exploration. LEO flights could be a profitable niche in the short term.